Friday, April 17, 2009

Holland: Day Two

This morning I woke up to David pacing the house. He woke up at 3am and stayed up entertaining himself until 7am when I finally woke up. When I got up he was doing calisthenics in the living room. Needless to say he has not yet adjusted to the time change.

Deb and Sonny made their flight with the kids and got here around 10am. I had such empathy watching them grumpily sleepwalk up the stairs and needless drag their suitcases behind them despite the fact that everyone else in the family offered to carry them. When they finally woke up from a 3-hour nap, they ate cookies for about the length of one episode of Larry King Live.

The owner of the house, Hans, came to pick up his mail today. (Apparently they can’t put it on hold here.) He was very nice and his English was excellent. We chatted for a while about what he did and how he enjoyed being out on his freighter delivering all sorts of things like charcoal and wood. Forty-two degrees out and he’s enjoying the open seas. After he left I felt dumb for only knowing one language.

We finally made it out the door after a long-winded conversation about what the week’s plans would hold. My mother-in-law had mapped it all out and began explaining it to us, as if any of us cared about where we went in Holland as long as it was somewhere. Within moments my brother-in-law and David were making Swedish Chef noises and my sister-in-law was staring me in the eyes the way only a pregnant woman can, mouthing, “STAR-VING. DIN-NER.”

Dinner was at a nice “yacht club” in which the club members actually lived in the yachts parked outside in the freezing Holland rain. I had tilapia, which was quite nice and not nearly as buttery as I’d feared. The frites were plentiful and my sworn enemy. Tonight, the enemy won.

When we got home my sister-in-law used my hair dryer to dry her hair and nearly blew it up plugging it into a European socket and turning it on high. She then blew up the kids’ plug-in fan she brought from the states. The entire upstairs smells like burnt turds wrapped in burnt hair. We all had a nice laugh with that one.

Tomorrow we are up and at ‘em at and out of the house by 9:30am. We’ll see how a day in Holland actually going somewhere compares to house lounging.